Hamas’s Goal in Gaza

Among the many striking aspects of Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel, one that has received relatively little scrutiny is the location. For much of the past decade, the Gaza Strip no longer appeared to be a major battleground for the Palestinian resistance. Recurring incursions by the Israeli army into Gaza, including the nearly two-month Operation “Protective Edge” in 2014, had locked Hamas into a defensive posture. Meanwhile, Israel’s increasingly sophisticated missile defenses had rendered Hamas’s rocket attacks from the strip largely ineffective, and the blockade of Gaza had cut off the territory from the rest of the world.

By contrast, the West Bank was a far more obvious arena of conflict. With its expanding Israeli settlements and frequent incursions by Israeli soldiers and settlers into Palestinian villages, the West Bank—along with the holy sites in Jerusalem—attracted continual international media attention. For Hamas and other militant groups, here was the more appropriate staging ground for nationalist Palestinian armed resistance. Indeed, Israel seemed to recognize this: on the eve of October 7, the Israeli forces were busy monitoring Palestinians in the West Bank, on the assumption that Gaza posed little threat other than occasional rocket fire.

But the October 7 operation radically contradicted that view. To launch its deadly dawn raid, Hamas’s Gaza-based military wing blew up the Erez border crossing with Israel and breached Gaza’s security barrier at numerous points. In killing more than 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 240 hostages, the attackers clearly anticipated a large-scale military response against Gaza, an expectation that has been confirmed in the Israeli army’s unprecedentedly violent air and ground offensive. In turn, the Israeli campaign, which has killed more than 17,000 Palestinians and caused enormous devastation across the territory, has dominated the attention of world leaders and the international media for weeks. In essence, after years of being consigned to the background, Gaza has become the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.

The renewed centrality of Gaza raises important questions about Hamas’s senior leadership. Previously, it had been assumed that Hamas was largely run from outside the territory by its leaders located in Amman, Damascus, and Doha. But that understanding is long out of date. At least since 2017, when Yahya Sinwar took over Hamas’s Gazan leadership, Hamas has undergone an organizational shift toward Gaza itself. Along with making the territory more autonomous from Hamas’s external leaders, Sinwar has presided over a strategic renewal of Hamas as a fighting force in Gaza. In particular, he has aimed at taking offensive action against Israel and connecting Gaza to the larger Palestinian struggle. At the same time, he has adjusted the movement’s strategies to account for evolving developments in the West Bank and Jerusalem, including the growing tensions around the al Aqsa mosque. Paradoxically, instead of isolating Gaza, the Israeli blockade has actually helped put the territory back at the center of world attention.

The Road from Damascus

As a political and military organization, Hamas has four centers of power: Gaza; the West Bank; Israeli prisons, where many senior Hamas figures have languished; and the “outside”—its external leadership. Of these four, the external leadership, which runs Hamas’s political bureau, has generally held sway over policy. In 1989, during the first intifada, Israel cracked down on Hamas, forcing the movement’s leaders to flee to Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Around 2000, Damascus became Hamas’s main headquarters.

From their perches abroad, these leaders maintained control over the movement’s military wing in Gaza, known as the Qassam Brigades. They also conducted diplomacy with foreign leaders and drew support from a range of foreign donors, including charitable associations, private donors, and, after the Madrid and Oslo peace process began, Iran. During these years, the outside leaders were dominant; some of them, like Khaled Meshal, the chair of the Hamas political bureau, had grown up in exile. From Amman and, later, Damascus, Meshal and the other leaders decided on war and peace, and the Qassam Brigades in the Palestinian territories had to act accordingly, even when they disagreed with these orders from afar.

But the primacy of Hamas’s external leaders was gradually called into question after Israel assassinated Sheikh Yassin, the movement’s spiritual head, in Gaza in 2004. Several factors enabled the Gazan organization to gain greater clout. One was Hamas’s victory in the 2006 elections and its formation of a government, both before and after it seized control of the strip in June 2007. Once Israel reinforced its blockade, the leaders of Gaza managed to generate revenue through trade via their clandestine network of tunnels, thus making the Gazan organization less dependent on the economic support of the diaspora.  

The Arab spring in general and the Syrian uprising in particular accelerated the shift toward Gaza. At the start of the Syrian civil war, Hamas’s Damascus-based leaders tried to mediate between the Syrian regime and Sunni insurgents. But they refused Iranian injunctions to show unconditional support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and in February 2012 finally decided to leave the country. Deputy chair Moussa Abu Marzouk settled in Cairo; Meshal went to Doha, where he strongly criticized Iran and Hezbollah, which was now assisting the Assad regime. In response, Iran suspended financial support for Hamas in two stages: in the summer of 2012 and in May 2013, when the Qassam Brigades fought Syrian regime forces and Hezbollah in the Battle of Qusayr. Iran reduced its economic aid to Hamas by half, from $150 million to less than $75 million per year.

These tensions, combined with the dispersal of the leaders, weakened Hamas’s external organization. “The departure from Syria helped the Gaza leadership a lot,” Ghazi Hamad, a senior member of Hamas, acknowledged when I interviewed him in Gaza in May 2013. “I’m not saying that Gaza has overtaken the leaders based outside Gaza, but there is now a greater balance between the two.” Notably, despite the rupture in Syria, the Gazan leadership was able to maintain strong links with Iran. This was particularly true of senior members of the Qassam Brigades such as Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, who traveled to Tehran whenever possible.

The growing autonomy of Hamas’s military organization was also clear in the case of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was abducted and taken to Gaza in 2006. It was Ahmed al-Jabari, the leader of the Qassam Brigades, who ordered Shalit’s capture and who, along with Hamad, negotiated the much-discussed 2011 agreement for Shalit’s release. According to the deal, the Israeli soldier was released in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, and many Palestinians saw it as a major victory for Hamas in Gaza. Israel assassinated Jabari a year later, opening a new military offensive against the Gaza Strip known as Operation “Pillar of Defense.”

Meanwhile, Israel’s recurring military operations in Gaza played their own role in strengthening the influence of the Qassam Brigades. On the frontlines in Gaza, these fighters could claim a central part in the struggle against Israel in contrast to the external leadership, which was increasingly marginalized. In recognition of the brigades’ growing importance, in 2013 three of its members joined the Hamas political bureau, giving the armed wing a new and direct role in political decision-making.

As the blockade continued, Gaza also gained importance as a symbolic territory and place of sacrifice, which Hamas’s political leaders needed to acknowledge to reinforce their legitimacy. For example, in 2012, to commemorate Hamas’s 25th anniversary, Meshal, who was then a candidate for reelection as chair of the political bureau, entered Gaza for the first time, giving a speech in which he evoked the blood of the martyrs and the sacrifice of the mothers of “eternal” Gaza. “I say I’m coming back here to Gaza,” he said, “even if it’s actually the first time I’ve been here, because Gaza has always been in my heart.” 

But it was in the years after 2017 that Gaza increasingly became central to Hamas’s senior leadership. That year, Meshal was succeeded as chair of the political bureau by Ismail Haniyeh, who had previously been the head of Hamas in Gaza. This move opened the way for enhanced relations between Hamas and the Iranians, who now dealt directly with Gazan interlocutors. For a number of reasons, including the difficulties of traveling in and out of Gaza, which depended on Egyptian goodwill, Haniyeh eventually relocated to Doha in December 2019. But Haniyeh’s departure also signaled the coming to power in Gaza of Sinwar, a former Hamas military commander who had begun to rival Haniyeh in influence.

Rearming the Resistance

Sinwar had been a crucial figure in the establishment of Hamas’s military wing in the 1980s. He then spent 22 years in Israeli prisons, where he helped build Hamas’s leadership; he was released in October 2011 as part of the Shalit deal. Sinwar had a proactive vision of the Palestinian armed struggle: for him, only offensive force and the assertion of power could pave the way to fairer negotiations with Israel. After becoming Hamas’s strongman in Gaza, he began to put this vision into practice. Thus, he sought to use Hamas’s control of the strip to extract further concessions from Israel, and he continued to expand the Qassam Brigades, which analysts estimate grew from fewer than 10,000 fighters in the first decade of this century to some 30,000 or more.

Within Hamas’s political ranks, only Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to Haniyeh, officially expressed reservations about Sinwar’s appointment. Yousef worried that too much decision-making power was being shifted to the Palestinian territories and felt that the external leadership should continue to have precedence. He also worried that Sinwar’s close ties with the movement’s armed wing could work against Hamas. According to Yousef, it could give the Israelis yet another pretext for treating Gaza as simply a breeding ground for Islamist terrorism.

Hamas’s outreach to Palestinians coincided with Arab leaders’ normalization with Israel.

But Sinwar soon proved he could get results. In 2018 and 2019, he was able to obtain a relative easing of the Israeli blockade by orchestrating the March of Return protests on Gaza’s barriers with Israel. Hamas quickly took advantage of these weekly protests, which drew tens of thousands of Gazans to the border to protest the blockade, to fire rockets and incendiary balloons toward Israel. In response to this pressure strategy, Israel ultimately entered into a series of agreements to allow the limited opening of several border crossings as well as increased Qatari funds to be delivered into Gaza to pay civil servants. Still, many Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank remained skeptical of Hamas, accusing it of using the marches to distract from growing criticism of its rule and wielding force only to defend its own interests in Gaza.

In 2021, Sinwar seized an opportunity to address Hamas’s credibility problem. At the time, Israel had launched a violent crackdown on Palestinians who were protesting Israeli evictions of Palestinian residents from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. On May 20, after issuing an ultimatum, the Qassam Brigades fired thousands of rockets at Ashdod, Ashkelon, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Spontaneously, Arab Israelis in many Israeli cities rose up in solidarity with the Palestinians in Jerusalem, enabling Hamas to reconnect with Palestinians outside Gaza and present itself as the protector of the holy city. Since then, the name of Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, has been chanted whenever Palestinians protest in Jerusalem or the West Bank.

Significantly, the Gazan leadership’s growing outreach to Palestinians outside of Gaza came shortly after Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates normalized relations with Israel. By entering these U.S.-brokered agreements—known as the Abraham Accords—these Arab countries made clear they were prepared to take such a historic step despite the looming prospect of an outright Israeli annexation of the West Bank. For the Palestinians, this was overwhelmingly regarded as a betrayal. Thus, at a moment when Arab countries were signaling that they would no longer defend the Palestinians, Hamas in Gaza was standing up for the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Since 2021, Hamas has also made a point of acting in solidarity with the Palestinians against the growing Israeli threats to the al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the Palestinians’ national symbol. Seen in this context, Hamas’s October 7 operation—which it calls the al Aqsa Flood—is part of the same logic of using offensive force to defend the Palestinian territories as a whole. Notably, the decision to attack appears to have come from within Hamas’s Gazan organization and did not involve the movement’s external leadership.  

Telling a Different Story

Since Israel’s war began, Hamas has also deployed a concerted media strategy to emphasize the centrality of Gaza in the Palestinian struggle. Foremost has been the group’s ability to communicate with the outside world during the fighting. Despite the Internet blackout of Gaza, intense Israeli bombing, and the destruction of telecommunications infrastructure across the territory, Hamas has continued to broadcast information from the battlefield, providing a continual counternarrative to official Israeli accounts of the war. By publishing almost daily videos of the destruction of Israeli tanks and challenging claims about hospitals used as human shields, the Qassam Brigades and Hamas’s Gazan organization overall have contradicted Israeli claims and maintained some influence over the coverage of the war by the international media.

Hamas’s external leaders in Doha do not appear to be involved in this information campaign, which is dictated and directed from Gaza. In contrast to Hamas’s communications during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s offensive against Gaza in 2008 and 2009, it is no longer the president of the Hamas political bureau who comments on unfolding events from an external location but a military leader—Abu Ubaida—who is on the ground in Gaza itself. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that Sinwar and the rest of the Hamas leadership in Gaza disdain the members of the movement in Doha, who live at a comfortable and luxurious remove from the conflict.

Hamas representatives in Lebanon, on the other hand, have had a significant part in the current information war. Osama Hamdan, the former head of Hamas’s department of foreign relations and one of the most prominent figures in the political bureau, has held regular press conferences in Beirut challenging Israeli narratives of the war. Unlike other Hamas figures, who have feared that Sinwar was too close to the Qassam Brigades, Hamdan considers the convergence of Hamas’s civilian and military wings perfectly natural. He also shares Sinwar’s view that only the use of force can help the Palestinian cause. (In an interview I conducted with Hamdan in 2017 in Beirut, he drew an analogy with Israel’s own leadership, noting that, “Israel’s political leaders, whether Netanyahu, Rabin, Barak, or Peres, were all warlords before they took on political responsibilities.”)

In his statements, Hamdan has sought to portray the war not as a Hamas battle but as a general struggle for Palestinian liberation, and he calls on the rest of the world to support the Palestinians against what he refers to as the “American-Zionist imperialist project.” According to him, the October 7 attack has resulted in several gains for Palestinians: freeing Palestinians jailed in Israel, drawing the Israeli army into a difficult situation on the ground, and forcing the evacuation of Israeli populations from northern towns bordering Lebanon and from the areas surrounding Gaza. Hamdan claims that it was the Israeli army’s growing difficulties in its ground campaign in Gaza that made Israel willing to pause the fighting and release Palestinian prisoners in exchange for some of the Israeli hostages. Hamdan also maintains that Israel decided to resume its military operation on December 1 because it had failed to accomplish its goals during the first phase of the fighting.

The Hamas narrative has not gone unchallenged in official Arab media, particularly in Saudi Arabia, which has traditionally been hostile to the movement. But Abu Ubaida’s and Hamdan’s statements have had a significant impact both in the greater Palestinian world and among the Arab populations in neighboring countries, some of whom may be more sympathetic to Hamas than they were before the war. In launching its operation, Hamas had shown that Israel was not invincible, in contrast to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which many Palestinians feel has done little to further their cause. Even if it has come at a high price, Hamas’s attack has made the liberation project concrete for Palestinians; and by provoking Israel to unleash its devastating invasion and massive killing of civilians, it has also brought extraordinary worldwide attention on the brutality of Israeli occupation and Israeli control of the Palestinian territories. These outcomes will probably have deep consequences for the future of the conflict.

What Day After?

In the weeks since Hamas launched its attack, much international attention has focused on the unprecedented massacre of Israeli civilians. Far less noted has been what the assault revealed about strategic shifts within Hamas itself. By forcing Israel to launch a huge war in Gaza, the October 7 operation has overturned the prevailing understanding of Gaza as a territory that had been liberated from Israeli occupation and whose status quo as an isolated enclave could be sustained indefinitely. However great the cost to the Gazans themselves, for Hamas, the war has already achieved the goals of positioning Gaza as a key piece of the Palestinian liberation struggle and of bringing that struggle to the center of international attention.

In turn, for the Palestinians, the war has reconnected Gaza to some of the central traumas of their historical experience. Presented by Israel as an emergency humanitarian measure, the forced displacement of Gaza’s populations to the southern end of the coastal strip—as well as plans mooted within the Netanyahu administration to relocate Gazans to the Sinai Desert—has reframed the situation in Gaza within the much longer history of Palestinian expulsion that has unfolded since 1948. These current efforts to displace or remove the Gazans are all the more significant since most of those being forced to move come from families who were already refugees from the 1948 crisis. For many of them—including hundreds of thousands who have refused to leave the northern part of the strip—the situation is repeating these earlier upheavals. As they see it, the only way to avoid the risk of a second nakba (or “catastrophe”) is to remain in Gaza, no matter how great the destruction. 

With Gaza once more under intense shelling after the collapse of the seven-day cease-fire, Israel and the United States have been discussing various scenarios for the “day after.” Although the two countries disagree on many issues, including the possibility of government by the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, which Israel rejects, both countries are adamant about the total eradication of Hamas. But this goal itself may be based on an understanding of the organization that does not take account of its current reality. So far, despite a five-week onslaught by one of the most powerful armies in the world—one in which an overwhelming majority of Gazans have been forced to leave their homes and more than 17,000 have been killed—Hamas shows few signs of having been eradicated. Not only has it managed to maintain itself; it has also asserted its autonomy from the organization’s outside leadership as well as its Arab allies and Iran, which was not warned of the attack. The Gazan organization’s ability to remain a force even now, with a highly structured leadership, a media presence, and a network of support, calls into serious question all the current debates about the future governance of the Gaza Strip.  

For the time being, as its forces have failed to fulfill its objectives in Gaza, Israel has stepped up military operations in the West Bank through daily raids, mass arrests, and sweeping crackdowns. Not only does this raise the prospect of a two-front war after years of Israeli efforts to separate the occupied Palestinian territories from the Gaza Strip. It also suggests that the Israeli military itself may help further Hamas’s own goal of reconnecting Gaza with the broader struggle for Palestinian liberation.